I’d just finished reading Caste, Isabel Wilkerson’s brilliant new book, when the Republicans convened their national convention and Mayor Rahm raised his head to offer advice for Democrats that no one sought or should follow.
She dissuades people from using the “R word”—as our “fixation with smoking out individual racists” is “a losing battle in which we fool ourselves into thinking we are rooting out injustice,” when, in fact, it can help keep “the hierarchy intact.”
At the convention you’re going to hear much talk about radical thugs, burning, and looting. And suburban women needing protection from the horrors of subsidized housing.
The modern-day Republican Party is schizophrenic when it comes to criminal justice reform. They want it for Trump and his celebrity pals (think Blago). But they don’t want it for millions of ordinary Black citizens.
Also, at the convention, you’ll hear much talk about keeping the radical left from destroying monuments to great Americans. Wilkerson devotes a chapter to the cult that’s emerged among white people, not just in the south, for confederate leaders like General Robert E. Lee, a vicious slave owner.
Cowardly Democrats have been urging activists to take it slow for decades—Martin Luther King Jr. wrote about it in Letter from a Birmingham Jail.
